Surprise! While everyone’s backs were turned, The Living End were stealthily recording their seventh studio album.

What’s more, frontman Chris Cheney has just confirmed via Instagram that the Aussie punk rock stalwarts’ first full-length LP since 2011's The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating is already done and dusted.

“It’s done. In the can. Finito!” He writes. “None of our other records have this much blood sweat and tears poured into them and you can hear it and most importantly you can feel it. Can’t wait for y’all to hear it. Thank you Paul Woody Annison Daniel Caswell Andy Strachan Scott Owen. What a f**kin insane journey!”

Cheney, who now lives in LA, has been uniting with his two bandmates in Melbourne over the past nine months to work on the disc with past collaborator Paul “Woody” Annison. They’d originally planned to record the album in the space of a few weeks, but when the songs started rolling out, things changed.

“It was sounding really good so we thought ‘let’s not stuff it up, let’s not rush it’,” Cheney told The Newcastle Herald. “Let’s take some time away from it.”

“It’s a different record for us,” he continued. “It’s got a lot of aggression and it’s very energetic. But for me it’s all about the song: if there’s no song, there’s no point.

“It’s still very song based and very melodic but it’s got an edge to it,” he said.

“If you try to clean everything up, you try to sing perfectly in tune and you try to sing perfectly in time, what you do is you kill what makes you great on stage. We’ve been guilty of that, time and time again.

“So what we’ve done on this one is we’ve gone in and only done a couple of takes of each song and we’ve really tried to think on the spot and gone: ‘let’s go with that idea, that chord, that part, that harmony’ and you just move on. You end up leaving a lot of rough edges and what it does is it gives the album a lot more life and depth.”

“We don’t want to stuff it up…” He concluded. “We always want to make sure we look after this band and look after the legacy of it because we want it to be good. It has to be good.”

The Living End are about to head out on the road supporting fellow Aussie rock veterans Cold Chisel on selected dates for their One Night Stand Tour. Check out venue and ticketing details below.

And now that we know that a new Living End album is fast on the way, how long til we hear more info?

“Mixing, mastering, artwork and videos still to follow, soon hopefully… soon,” the band posted on their official Facebook page.